GUADEC

GUADEC (GNOME Users and Developers European Conference) is the GNOME Project's annual meeting for developers and users, held annually in cities around Europe it is the largest gathering of GNOME developers, users, foundation leaders, governments and businesses in the world. In 2010 GUADEC was held in The Hague, Netherlands July 24-30th, with more than X people attending over the course of the conference.

GUADEC 2010 was largely focused on the (then) upcoming release of GNOME 3, and as expected many of the talks, meetings, and hackfests were focused on GNOME-Shell and other GNOME 3 technologies. The previewing of GNOME-Shell was one of the highlights, along with the announcement that GNOME 3 was being delayed to March 2011. GNOME 3 was to have been released that September, and it was decided that another 6 months was needed to ensure it would be well received by the community.

The first two days of the conference were a combination of hackfests, meet-ups and team meetings. The following tow days were full of keynotes, various sessions & lightening talks on subjects to numerous to list. One of the keynotes was given by Danny O'Brien regarding free speech and open source software. He explained how free speech can be both either hindered or helped by open source/free software depending on how it is presented. The other keynote of the conference was given by Xan López and Fernando Herrera on the (then) current state of GNOME.

In 2011 GUADEC was held in conjunction with Akademy resulting in the second Desktop Summit, held in Berlin, Germany at the Technology Foundation of Berlin (TSB) August 6th to the 12th, 2011. Attendees gathered to share ideas and work together on free and open source software projects relating to both the desktop and mobile interfaces.

Throughout the conference 85 “Birds of a Feather” sessions were held, including the most sought after event the Intel AppUp workshop, which explained aspects of Intel's MeeGo operating system including long-term strategy and the push for developers to create mobile apps for it. After the session participants each received a tablet to help support the development efforts.

Numerous hackfests and informal hacking sessions also took place on a wide range of projects small and large. With two main hacking rooms and the outside hallways were nearly always full of people working on various projects. GObject Introspection had a dedicated room with 12-20 people, mostly focused on bug fixes for the GNOME API bindings.

The GNOME and KDE Annual General Meetings (AGMs) were also held in conjunction with the Desktop Summit. During the AGMs GNOME and KDE were able to recognize the achievements of individuals for their work over the last year, as well as make important announcements and reflect on the lessons of the last year.